The Lineaments of Desire

The honeymoon period of the Labour government has been less revealing of Starmer's true nature or his administration's priorities, all of which were made abundantly clear before the general election, than it has of the hopes and fears of the commentariat. Inevitably, none has been busier in articulating their desires than Polly Toynbee at the Guardian. On The Monday after the vote, when it was clear how shallow support for the incoming government was but before the King's Speech confirmed its intentions, she was demanding that Starmer addressed the cynicism of the electorate through the trifecta of Lords Reform, a cap on political donations and the introduction of proportional representation. Obviously, none of this made the cut and you can safely assume we'll be in much the same situation in 2029 as we are today, even if they do get around to retiring a few hereditary peers. After the King's Speech she was reduced to insisting that the government would surely abolish the 2-child benefit cap, despite other commentator's noting that there was no way the government would take any action that could be seen as ceding to pressure from the left.

In between times, our fearless politics-understander went on safari to observe the Tories in defeat and was delighted to discover that Nigel Farage is alive and well. With the newly-installed government giving every sign that it will disappoint her liberal hopes, she was happy to displace her energies onto the defeated enemy. It was long thought that Farage got disproportionate coverage on the BBC and elsewhere because of the influence of the Tory press, but we're about to witness the determination of the liberal press to keep him front and centre, both to encourage the continuing division of the political right and to fill the void where progressive reform should be. Picking up the weekend baton, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer has decided that we can finally discern the lineaments of Starmerism: "This is turning out to be a very political government led by a very political prime minister accompanied by a very political cabinet." That might sound banal, but what Rawnsley actually means is that this is a government with a clear agenda. He puts it bluntly: "This isn’t socialism. It is using the power of the state to try to galvanise a more productive capitalism." And then even more bluntly: "One thing is already clear. The Starmer government is not at all libertarian."

Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times took, as is his wont, a more Olympian view on what he described as the doom loop of modern politics: "Hatred of politicians deters good people from the job, which makes government worse, which makes voters hate politicians still more". This thought was stimulated by the failed attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which Ganesh immediately linked to people in the UK telling parliamentary candidates to fuck off: "The harassment of candidates in Britain’s election has been met with a sinister breeziness. To be clear, then: the anti-politician culture is wrong in and of itself. But more than that, it is self-reinforcing." Far from a sinister breeziness (what even is that?), the travails of various Labour candidates beaten by pro-Gaza independents or Greens has resulted in the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, promising taskforces and crackdowns, not to mention TV allowing the likes of Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire to air their grievances and suggest that voting them out of office was somehow unfair. What is sinister here is the conflation of legitimate anger with illegitimate violence, something we've also seen in the judicial treatment of Just Stop Oil protestors this last week.

Ganesh makes the connection explicit as part of his claim that we're not recruiting the best people to Parliament: "Actual violence is worse than intimidation, which is worse than verbal abuse, which is worse than invasive attention, which is worse than the reflexive, almost rote-learned cynicism that is now the routine lot of the politician in front of a public audience (“Why should I believe a word you say?” etc). But all have the same effect. All deter able individuals." This is mere sophistry. They clearly aren't comparable, unless you think that a life sentence in prison and missing the bus are equivalent as reasons for why I missed a football match. The purpose is to equate a lack of respect for the political class with violence - i.e. incivility as the gateway drug to assassination. The key thing we know about the two political murders in Britain in recent years, the killing of MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, is that they were committed by respectively a neo-Nazi and a Jihadi, both clearly unbalanced. To read from this that the problem is a wider societal disrespect for politicians is absurd.

Ganesh goes further to suggest that there is something tragic in the very nature of political life. The example he offers is frankly comical: "Robert McNamara was a jewel of his American generation — Harvard Business School star, Ford Motor Company whizz — and a tragically fumbling Pentagon chief during the Vietnam war." The assumption that academic or commercial credentials make you a natural for politics is naive technocracy, while the implicit appeal to meritocracy is pernicious (note how much that misunderstood concept has featured in the propaganda around the new UK government's social plans, such as Bridget Phillipson's belief that her life story can inspire a nation). Not only do people succeed at one firm and fail at another, highlighting the importance of institutions and tacit knowledge, but politics is inevitably constrained by circumstance and ideology. The Ford Edsel was an unforced error; the Vietnam quagmire was the consequence of the analytical errors of anticommunism that had become settled, bipartisan policy.

Writing in what is by defnition the inner sanctum of the liberal elite, Ganesh has no reservations about pointing the finger at the real villain: "It is natural to attribute the anti-politician mood to governmental failures: the botched wars, the misregulation of banks, the British state’s formidable achievement of rising taxes and deteriorating outcomes. There isn’t anything like the same curiosity about the source of those failures. What if the causal link runs the other way? What if an inept state is the ultimate fruit of anti-politics?" In other words, what if it is the fault of the people? Ganesh wants this to be true, as I'm sure many of his readers do, and to that end he will happily deny the evidence of his own eyes and insist that the failure of Northern Rock was the fault of its depositors, not its reckless management, and that the increasingly poor performance of the NHS is down to the sick rather than the failure of politicians to adequately fund it. This is frankly no different to a tabloid berating benefit claimants or insisting that the NHS is struggling due to uncontrolled immigration.

Though they operate in very different registers, what is common to Toynbee, Rawnsley and Ganesh is the hope that under a Starmer government we will see a change in the political culture. For Toynbee,  this is a matter of virtue: "cleaning up our fetid politics". For Rawnsley, the emphasis is on the efficient, even brutal exercise of power: using "legislative hammers" and being "tough and dirigiste in the pursuit of its most critical goals". For Ganesh, the desire is for an end to populism, which is to say for democracy to take a back seat and for the electorate to be less demanding of the political class. Government should get on and govern, and the electorate should know its place. How much Starmer will satisfy their desires is moot, depending as it does on contingency and the level of public resistance, but you can already expect Toynbee to be the most disappointed. This will not be a notably liberal government, except in the narrow economic sense, and in the sphere of planning its "dirigiste" intentions will inevitably give way to the interests of capital, so Rawnsley will be making excuses at some point in the future. The one who appears most likely to get his wish is Ganesh, simply because all he wants is the restraint of democracy, which remains the abiding desire of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well.